Office Dev Con a Success in Redmond

This week Microsoft is holding an Office Developer conference in Redmond, WA. Yes, I’m not there! I was invited, but just could not make it. I sure hope Microsoft will do this again next year if they do it again.

I’ve heard that there are about 800 in attendance. The interesting thing is that was by invitation only, I’m sure to manage the volume of attendees since they did this at the campus. Imagine if they had opened general registration to the public. Many in the industry have speculated that Office developer conferences are dead. Clearly, that is not the case, I guess it has to be Microsoft running them and being on campus is great.

I did watch Bill Gates presentation at the conference today via Live Meeting where he talked about the importance of Office. I’ve heard from years that Gates is a big Office fan. After today, I have no doubt that Gates is intimately involved in the past and future of Office.

I thought I’d share a few highlights from his presentation that stood out to me:

Bill Gates is not the average Software architect. I was stunned with how well he understands Office as a platform and how it fits into the future of all Microsoft products. He is really the Chief Software Architect. Bill mentioned the following:

• Office is the most widely used program. When they can improve Office, the impact to productivity world wide is significant.
• So much to still do with office, Gates feels we are 1/3 of the way to ultimate productivity.
• He officially announced VSTO 2005 Beta 2 available next month

Also, KD Hallman, General Manager for the VSTO team did a great presentation on the new VSTO 2005 features. It is one of the best executive level Office developer demos I’ve seen in years. Cool Features! Visuallly Compelling!

Finally, they did a 30 minute Q&A session. One attendee asked about the future of Forms. He stated that there are so many form methodologies (WinForms, InfoPath, ASP.NET Forms, Access Forms, etc). Gates responded that in the future (and thinking ahead strategically), we should consider InfoPath as designer and that forms created on it will set on top of other technologies:  InfoPath Client as a client, in the future Avalon Forms (avalon is the new presentation layer coming out with LongHorn) and he hinted at in the future there would be something for the server. Its an interesting vision. One designer, and it outputs for the various presentation formats.